Machines have been design to clean fixed surfaces such as floors, walls and structures, with a forced liquid spray or sand blasting, together with the vacuum recovery of the spent cleaning medium, and the unwanted dirt and debris. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,149,345, dated Apr. 17, 1979, and its cited references; U.S. Pat. No. 2,628,456, dated Jan. 15, 1952, and its cited references.
Suction recovery of unwanted dirt and debris through remote tool heads or enclosures have normally been limited to air or liquid borne particulates such as is shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,444,146, dated Apr. 24, 1984 and its cited references.
However few attempts have been made at cleaning weighted objects such as gravel and rocks which are vacuumed ingested into a cleaning tumbler wherein the articles are subject to pressurized heated liquid spray cleaning. The same vacuum that ingested the articles into the tumbler recovers the removed dirt, debris and contaminates as well as the cleaning fluid from the tumbler for safe environmentally controlled disposal.